Seminar Series

More than 600,000 prisoners are released from U.S. prisons each year, and roughly one-half of these individuals are back in prison within just three year, creating a vicious cycle of recidivism. In this seminar, Kirk discusses the experimental housing mobility program for recently released prisoners, The Maryland Opportunities through Vouchers Experiment (MOVE). Kirk designed MOVE to test whether residential relocation far away from former neighborhoods can yield reductions in recidivism.

Duke University's Cheryl Elman discusses the relationship between development and disease in the twentieth century American south. Plantation croppers, disproportionately African American, were generally malnourished, poorly housed, and legally tied to farms through debt to plantation owners and local merchants. The southern population through the 1940s was also exposed to poor sanitation and parasitic diseases of malaria and hookworm.

In this seminar, Filiz Garip discusses how homophily and consolidation allow researchers to capture the structural constraints to diffusion, and explains why some newly-emerging migrant communities eventually come to surpass historic migrant regions in levels of migration.

A wide variety of models are applied to analyze longitudinal data. This seminar provides an overview of three popular ones: the latent growth curve (LGC), the autoregressive (AR), and the autoregressive latent trajectory (ALT) longitudinal models. The seminar presents each model and discusses their parameters and interpretation.

Martin Ruef examines how slavery relentlessly produced racial segregation during the antebellum period, both at the macro-level - through the uneven distribution of the nonwhite population across regions, states, and counties - and at the micro-level - through the isolation of slaves and free people of color away from the residences of whites. Ruef draws the conclusion that institutional slavery played a critical part in concentrating African Americans within a subset of counties in the U.S. South while rendering them invisible to broad segments of the white populace.

Today's college students are in an increasingly diverse society, yet the majority of students still live in segregated communities across the United States before moving to college. The incoming student’s college dormitory experience marks a potentially meaningful and naturally existing cross-group event. Gaither reviews her past work on cross-race roommates and the resulting positive outcomes of improved interracial behavior. She also discusses current work on whether having a randomly-assigned versus a self-selected roommate influences student diversity outcomes.

Combining a natural experiment and a panel survey, we examine the effect of prenatal exposure to stress on children's outcomes. We find persistent negative effects on cognition, executive function, and educational achievement. The negative effect is strong among children in poor families but non-existent among middle-class children. Stanford University's Florencia Torche discusses possible mechanisms for these negative effects.

Elizabeth Bruch discusses how she applied rich activity data from a large, U.S. online dating site to examine how population composition interacts with mate-seeking behavior to shape men and women's romantic outcomes. She also reviews how local markets shape dating experiences both directly, by constraining the type and number of people one is exposed to, and indirectly, through the dynamic interplay between human behavior and experience.

Duke University’s Scott Lynch discusses "progressive mediation,” a theory that suggests the extent to which childhood SES exerts an independent influence on adult health depends on the seriousness of the health outcome being considered. Lynch posits that childhood status can have strong residual influences on lesser health conditions and precursors to more serious conditions, while having weak, or no, residual influences on more serious health conditions.

Paul Hooper discusses how his own unique model of evolutionary intergenerational transfers is also broadly relevant for understanding the evolution of human life histories, including longevity, length of dependence, age-schedule of fertility and demographic transitions.